by Thomas Hardy
XL
The silence of Swithin was to be accounted for by the circumstance thatneither to the Mediterranean nor to America had he in the first placedirected his steps. Feeling himself absolutely free he had, on arrivingat Southampton, decided to make straight for the Cape, and hence had notgone aboard the Occidental at all. His object was to leave his heavierluggage there, examine the capabilities of the spot for his purpose, findout the necessity or otherwise of shipping over his own equatorial, andthen cross to America as soon as there was a good opportunity. Here hemight inquire the movements of the Transit expedition to the SouthPacific, and join it at such a point as might be convenient.
Thus, though wrong in her premisses, Viviette had intuitively decidedwith sad precision. There was, as a matter of fact, a great possibilityof her not being able to communicate with him for several months,notwithstanding that he might possibly communicate with her.
This excursive time was an awakening for Swithin. To alteredcircumstances inevitably followed altered views. That such changesshould have a marked effect upon a young man who had made neither grandtour nor petty one--who had, in short, scarcely been away from home inhis life--was nothing more than natural. New ideas struggled to disclosethemselves and with the addition of strange twinklers to his southernhorizon came an absorbed attention that way, and a correspondingforgetfulness of what lay to the north behind his back, whether human orcelestial. Whoever may deplore it few will wonder that Viviette, whotill then had stood high in his heaven, if she had not dominated it,sank, like the North Star, lower and lower with his retreat southward.Master of a large advance of his first year's income in circular notes,he perhaps too readily forgot that the mere act of honour, but for herself-suppression, would have rendered him penniless.
Meanwhile, to come back and claim her at the specified time, four yearsthence, if she should not object to be claimed, was as much a part of hisprogramme as were the exploits abroad and elsewhere that were to preludeit. The very thoroughness of his intention for that advanced dateinclined him all the more readily to shelve the subject now. Her unhappycaution to him not to write too soon was a comfortable license in hispresent state of tension about sublime scientific things, which knew notwoman, nor her sacrifices, nor her fears. In truth he was not only tooyoung in years, but too literal, direct, and uncompromising in nature tounderstand such a woman as Lady Constantine; and she suffered for thatlimitation in him as it had been antecedently probable that she would do.
He stayed but a little time at Cape Town on this his first reconnoitringjourney; and on that account wrote to no one from the place. On leavinghe found there remained some weeks on his hands before he wished to crossto America; and feeling an irrepressible desire for further studies innavigation on shipboard, and under clear skies, he took the steamer forMelbourne; returning thence in due time, and pursuing his journey toAmerica, where he landed at Boston.
Having at last had enough of great circles and other nautical reckonings,and taking no interest in men or cities, this indefatigable scrutineer ofthe universe went immediately on to Cambridge; and there, by the help ofan introduction he had brought from England, he revelled for a time inthe glories of the gigantic refractor (which he was permitted to use onoccasion), and in the pleasures of intercourse with the scientific grouparound. This brought him on to the time of starting with the Transitexpedition, when he and his kind became lost to the eye of civilizationbehind the horizon of the Pacific Ocean.
To speak of their doings on this pilgrimage, of ingress and egress, oftangent and parallax, of external and internal contact, would availnothing. Is it not all written in the chronicles of the AstronomicalSociety? More to the point will it be to mention that Viviette's letterto Cambridge had been returned long before he reached that place, whileher missive to Marseilles was, of course, misdirected altogether. Onarriving in America, uncertain of an address in that country at which hewould stay long, Swithin wrote his first letter to his grandmother; andin this he ordered that all communications should be sent to await him atCape Town, as the only safe spot for finding him, sooner or later. Theequatorial he also directed to be forwarded to the same place. At thistime, too, he ventured to break Viviette's commands, and address a letterto her, not knowing of the strange results that had followed his absencefrom home.
It was February. The Transit was over, the scientific company had brokenup, and Swithin had steamed towards the Cape to take up his permanentabode there, with a view to his great task of surveying, charting andtheorizing on those exceptional features in the southern skies which hadbeen but partially treated by the younger Herschel. Having entered TableBay and landed on the quay, he called at once at the post-office.
Two letters were handed him, and he found from the date that they hadbeen waiting there for some time. One of these epistles, which had aweather-worn look as regarded the ink, and was in old-fashionedpenmanship, he knew to be from his grandmother. He opened it before hehad as much as glanced at the superscription of the second.
Besides immaterial portions, it contained the following:--
'J reckon you know by now of our main news this fall, but lest you should not have heard of it J send the exact thing snipped out of the newspaper. Nobody expected her to do it quite so soon but it is said hereabout that my lord bishop and my lady had been drawing nigh to an understanding before the glum tidings of Sir Blount's taking of his own life reached her; and the account of this wicked deed was so sore afflicting to her mind, and made her poor heart so timid and low, that in charity to my lady her few friends agreed on urging her to let the bishop go on paying his court as before, notwithstanding she had not been a widow-woman near so long as was thought. This, as it turned out, she was willing to do; and when my lord asked her she told him she would marry him at once or never. That's as J was told, and J had it from those that know.'
The cutting from the newspaper was an ordinary announcement of marriagebetween the Bishop of Melchester and Lady Constantine.
Swithin was so astounded at the intelligence of what for the nonce seemedViviette's wanton fickleness that he quite omitted to look at the secondletter; and remembered nothing about it till an hour afterwards, whensitting in his own room at the hotel.
It was in her handwriting, but so altered that its superscription had notarrested his eye. It had no beginning, or date; but its contents soonacquainted him with her motive for the precipitate act. The fewconcluding sentences are all that it will be necessary to quote here:--
'There was no way out of it, even if I could have found you, without infringing one of the conditions I had previously laid down. The long desire of my heart has been not to impoverish you or mar your career. The new desire was to save myself and, still more, another yet unborn. . . . I have done a desperate thing. Yet for myself I could do no better, and for you no less. I would have sacrificed my single self to honesty, but I was not alone concerned. What woman has a right to blight a coming life to preserve her personal integrity? . . . The one bright spot is that it saves you and your endowment from further catastrophes, and preserves you to the pleasant paths of scientific fame. I no longer lie like a log across your path, which is now as open as on the day before you saw me, and ere I encouraged you to win me. Alas, Swithin, I ought to have known better. The folly was great, and the suffering be upon my head! I ought not to have consented to that last interview: all was well till then! . . . Well, I have borne much, and am not unprepared. As for you, Swithin, by simply pressing straight on your triumph is assured. Do not communicate with me in any way--not even in answer to this. Do not think of me. Do not see me ever any more.--Your unhappy
'VIVIETTE.'
Swithin's heart swelled within him in sudden pity for her, first; then heblanched with a horrified sense of what she had done, and at his ownrelation to the deed. He felt like an awakened somnambulist who shouldfind that he had been accessory to a tragedy duri
ng his unconsciousness.She had loosened the knot of her difficulties by cutting itunscrupulously through and through.
The big tidings rather dazed than crushed him, his predominant feelingbeing soon again one of keenest sorrow and sympathy. Yet one thing wasobvious; he could do nothing--absolutely nothing. The event which he nowheard of for the first time had taken place five long months ago. Hereflected, and regretted--and mechanically went on with his preparationsfor settling down to work under the shadow of Table Mountain. He was asone who suddenly finds the world a stranger place than he thought; but isexcluded by age, temperament, and situation from being much more than anastonished spectator of its strangeness.
* * * * *
The Royal Observatory was about a mile out of the town, and hither herepaired as soon as he had established himself in lodgings. He haddecided, on his first visit to the Cape, that it would be highlyadvantageous to him if he could supplement the occasional use of thelarge instruments here by the use at his own house of his own equatorial,and had accordingly given directions that it might be sent over fromEngland. The precious possession now arrived; and although the sight ofit--of the brasses on which her hand had often rested, of the eyepiecethrough which her dark eyes had beamed--engendered some decidedly bitterregrets in him for a time, he could not long afford to give to the pastthe days that were meant for the future.
Unable to get a room convenient for a private observatory he resolved atlast to fix the instrument on a solid pillar in the garden; and severaldays were spent in accommodating it to its new position. In thislatitude there was no necessity for economizing clear nights as he hadbeen obliged to do on the old tower at Welland. There it had happenedmore than once, that after waiting idle through days and nights of cloudyweather, Viviette would fix her time for meeting him at an hour when atlast he had an opportunity of seeing the sky; so that in giving to herthe golden moments of cloudlessness he was losing his chance with theorbs above.
Those features which usually attract the eye of the visitor to a newlatitude are the novel forms of human and vegetable life, and other suchsublunary things. But the young man glanced slightingly at these; thechanges overhead had all his attention. The old subject was imprintedthere, but in a new type. Here was a heaven, fixed and ancient as thenorthern; yet it had never appeared above the Welland hills since theywere heaved up from beneath. Here was an unalterable circumpolar regionbut the polar patterns stereotyped in history and legend--without whichit had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist--had never beenseen therein.
St. Cleeve, as was natural, began by cursory surveys, which were notlikely to be of much utility to the world or to himself. He wastedseveral weeks--indeed above two months--in a comparatively idle survey ofsouthern novelties; in the mere luxury of looking at stellar objectswhose wonders were known, recounted, and classified, long before his ownpersonality had been heard of. With a child's simple delight he allowedhis instrument to rove, evening after evening, from the gorgeous glitterof Canopus to the hazy clouds of Magellan. Before he had well finishedthis optical prelude there floated over to him from the other side of theEquator the postscript to the epistle of his lost Viviette. It came inthe vehicle of a common newspaper, under the head of 'Births:'--
'April 10th, 18--, at the Palace, Melchester, the wife of the Bishop ofMelchester, of a son.'